Google funds students to write code for PIH’s medical record system

Posted on March 15, 2007

PIH's EMR system in use in Peru

This summer, students around the world have the opportunity to participate in an exciting collaboration between OpenMRS and Google, Inc., to help develop an open-source medical record system that improves the care of patients with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. But they only have until March 24 to apply.

PIH was one of two organizations that founded OpenMRS in 2004, along with the Regenstrief Institute, a world-renowned leader in medical informatics research. The OpenMRS system builds on lessons learned from the PIH Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system used in Peru and Haiti. And the new PIH EMR 2.0 that was recently rolled out in Rwanda is built on top of the OpenMRS framework.

The Google Summer of Code 2007 program will pay stipends of $4,500 apiece to allow as many as 10 promising student software developers to spend their summer vacation writing new code for the OpenMRS. The OpenMRS has already been implemented in several African countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Uganda, and Tanzania.

During the 12-week program, student programmers will work directly with assigned mentors from PIH and the Regenstrief Institute to complete their choice of a variety of focused development tasks laid out by the OpenMRS collaborative.

The OpenMRS team summed up what it is looking for in four bullet points: